Duarte cries crocodile tears

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The vicious nature of capitalism in El Salvador was revealed most openly during the recent earthquake.

Over 200,000 were left home -less as their houses collapsed: around them. Nine working-class neighborhoods in the capital city of San Salvador were over half destroyed.

The Salvadoran rulers and their U.S. backers cried crocodile tears about the desperate need of the people. But the truth is that most aid was given to the upper-class neighborhoods—which have suf -fered the least damage.

Water, electricity, and telephone service were restored to the wealthier districts within two days. Weeks later, on the other hand, thousands of poor people continued to sleep in the streets. Medical teams encountered long delays in trying to obtain necessary supplies from govern -ment bureaucrats.

"It's bad, it's very bad," Claude Mahoudeau, an official of the French relief organization Doctors Without Borders, said on Oct. 12. "There is no coordina -tion and no government help in the poor areas."

When some government aid did arrive, a week or so later, much of it was disbursed by the infamous Treasury Police, widely known for its corruption and its ties to right-wing death squads.

The Salvadoran daily El Diario de Hoy commented on Oct. 19 that despite the rising numbers of sick and hungry, "tons of plastic tenting and all kinds of provisions are piling up in [municipal] warehouses."

The Archbishop of San Salvador, Arturo Rivera y Damas, harshly criticized the failure to provide greater relief services to the poor: "What is most apparent, without offering lectures on social class, is that the poor neighborhoods of the marginal zones are those that suffer most and are those that show the precarious conditions, often inhuman, in which our people live."

A stark picture of those inhuman conditions was given by James Lemoyne in the Oct. 13 New York Times. His article from the Comunidad Modelo neighborhood starts off:

"The people of this miserable warren of mud shacks have been promised by the government that it will help them rebuild from the earthquake that swept away their homes and buried their loved ones on Friday morning. But tonight, as the rains of a violent thunderstorm added to their misery, they found it hard to believe that the promise would be kept any time soon."

"Comunidad Modelo," Le -moyne pointed out, "is one of the dozens of poor neighborhoods that circle the capital city of San Salvador, housing thousands of refugees from the war and the urban unemployed—people who provide the most recruits to the guerrillas."

These working-class ghettos have suffered the most from the earthquake largely because of the appalling condition of their ram -shackle housing-often slapped together from pieces of tin. The impoverished residents are often compelled to construct their shacks on mountainsides. When the earthquake hit, the shacks slid down and were buried in a mountain of mud and debris.

Typically, these communities have no running water, no health care, and least of all, any influence that could bring government aid emergency• Lemoyne stressed that EI Salvador "is a highly stratified society, in which the richest live in walled homes in beautiful neighborhoods and the poorest in squalid canyons such as this one. Thus, the lack of help from the more affluent appears as notable as the absence of help from the American-trained and Americanfinanced army."

"There are no volunteer soup kitchens or clothes distribution centers in Comunidad Modelo," LeMoyne continued. "The only apparent service was a crude clinic on the back of a flatbed in th Struck, manned by teen-agers from the local Boy and Girl Scouts."

Stepped-up bombing Immediately following the earthquake, left-wing guerrilla groups declared a unilateral cease fire in order to aid rescue operations. But their offer was rejected by President Jose Napoleon Duarte. The govern -ment responded instead by stepping up aerial bombing raids on areas of the country deemed sympathetic to the rebels.

For over a week after the quake, Salvadoran military forces kept a notable distance from rescue sites. "In a daylong tour of disaster areas," The New York Times reported on Oct. 13, "not one soldier was seen helping people dig out their homes and relatives. Two officers said the army was busy providing security."

Clearly, the 50,000-man Salvadoran army is not there to protect and help the victims of the earthquake, but to guard the wealthy from the poor.

The military of El Salvador, like the contras of Nicaragua, are financed by the United States to protect the investments of U.S. capitalists—as well as their local capitalist junior partners. Their job is to jail, torture, and murder the people of El Salvador and Nicaragua who are determined to fight for their independence and for a better life.

These events following the earthquake shed more light on the lies of the U.S. capitalist government, which maintains that it supports "freedom fight -ers" in these countries. They are butchers bought and paid for with our taxes and sent to murder the real freedom fighters.

jobs leads automatically to increased accidents. Train derailments are way up since rail cutbacks began. The employers have blamed these accidents on the workers, accusing them of being "under the influence" of drugs and alcohol. And now they do this with the bipartisan blessings of the government.

Action Closing date: Oct. 25, 1986 Editor: ALAN BENJAMIN Asst. Editor: MICHAEL SCHREIBER Staff: Paul Colvin, Suzanne Forsyth, May May Gong, David Kirschner, Hayden Perry, Joe Ryan, Carole Seligman, Kwame M.A. Somburu, Sylvia Weinstein.

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